


Cold Comfort

by SylvanWitch



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Book 6: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, F/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-09-26 12:35:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17141858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: He’s expecting the knock when it comes later that night.  He stops himself from tracing the invisible weight around his wrists where the vow bites him and opens the door to his visitor.





	Cold Comfort

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Trobadora](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trobadora/gifts).



> For Trobadora, who gave me the inspiration to reconsider a certain scene.

He’s expecting the knock when it comes later that night.  He stops himself from tracing the invisible weight around his wrists where the vow bites him and opens the door to his visitor.

 

Her cold eyes gleam and the witch’s streak in her hair is limned in silver by the weak moon.

 

He has already cast a privacy charm over the cheerless room; his reluctant upstairs guest will not have heard the knock, will not hear her now as she touches his arm hesitantly and offers him a further reward for his service.

 

Snape sees the revulsion in her eyes even as she leans toward him, rising on her toes to kiss him.  Her lips taste like cold ashes, and she shivers under his hands, which have risen involuntarily to cup her elbows.

 

There is nothing here he wants.

 

She cannot know what she asks of him, this further betrayal.  There was only one pair of eyes he had counted on to look inside of him and see his truth—the sinuous wave of his darkest thoughts, the struggle of the boy to rise above the swamping muck, to be someone she could be proud to know.

 

Her eyes had been cold, too, the last time he’d looked into them:  cold and dead and accusing.  He’d known then as he’d cradled her, unmoving, in his arms—the only time he’d been allowed to hold her—that she’d never have understood him.

 

It was not her failing but his.

 

Now, he puts Narcissa aside gently, gestures her to the sprung seat of the sofa, offers her tea and turns his back, giving her the only thing he can—the privacy of a moment to recover from his rejection.  It isn’t selfless, this gesture:  He doesn’t want to see the relief flood her pale face.

 

“It isn’t only a duty,” she whispers at last, a thin lie to cover a myriad of truths that crowd the corners of this wretched room.

 

At this he does turn, offers her a sneer, the flat blackness of his ugliest smile, the one that strips her of pretense.  She shrinks beneath that gaze, and he tries not to feel proud of himself.  Surely, she has suffered worse treatment beneath the uncompromising eyes of her husband.

 

“It isn’t desire,” he counters then, stepping closer just to watch her flinch.

 

But he’s forgotten who she is beneath the desperate mother, the dutiful wife, forgotten that she is, after all, Bellatrix’s sister.

 

There is steel instead of moonlight in her eyes when she straightens in her seat, rises gracefully, like ice beneath the deceptive black waves revealing itself when the collision with the doomed prow is inevitable.

 

She takes a step across that threadbare embarrassment of a carpet, takes another with her eyes fixed like a snake’s to his.  He feels caught by her look and by the way her lips part to reveal the tip of her viper’s tongue.

 

This time, he does not hold her off, this time he allows the kiss to deepen, lets her take what she is after—absolution, damnation, some twisted benediction to carry her through the perilous watches of the night—and when she is done he feels lightheaded, like he has been holding his breath.

 

Like the waves have closed over his head.  It is cold, but it is comfort of a sort, and he finds himself grateful for it.

 

It is she now who smiles, she who strokes his cheek with an icy hand, who murmurs in his ear, “Thank you,” though whether it’s for refusing her favors or saving her son or some combination of perfidy and debt he does not have the capacity to say.

 

He nods his head, hoping his expression doesn’t give away the way his heart is throwing itself against the cage of his ribs, the way his hands, tucked inside his belled sleeves, shake and shake.

 

“You are a good man, Severus Snape,” she says at the door, looking back at him over her left shoulder.

 

“I am a fool,” he answers, bitter but honest.

 

She smiles then, a small but genuine one, the first heat she’s brought into this exchange.  “It amounts to the same thing.”

 

And then she is past the boundaries of his wards and is gone in a flash, only the afterimage of that bright streak of hair, only a Cheshire smile, mysterious, left to tell him she was ever there at all.


End file.
